Data from the blaze in Utah could improve models of how wildfire smoke spreads.
Sometime in late June, if all goes to plan, a helicopter will hover above a thickly forested slope in Utah and set it ablaze. The goal is to clear out dead conifer trees to allow quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) to regain a foothold in this high-altitude national forest. But the blaze could also help scientists better understand wildfires.
A new restoration project proposed by Manti-La Sal National Forest will strip dead and diseased trees from a swath of Utah about the size of Bryce Canyon National Park.
The idea is to take out the most volatile fuel for potential wildfires which have grown in size, frequency and cost to fight.
With the wildfire season already under way in British Columbia and Alberta, Environment Canada is predicting a long, hot summer to come.
The wildfire threat has already forced evacuations in northwestern Alberta and central British Columbia, and the preliminary outlook for this summer points to worsening conditions, said David Phillips, Environment and Climate Change Canada’s senior climatologist.
Warmer temperatures, gusty winds and no rain continued to cause unpredictable conditions for firefighters in northern Alberta on Monday, but officials said measures to keep flames away from threatened communities were working.
The largest blaze in northern Alberta remained about three kilometres southwest of High Level, where crews have been bulldozing, back-burning and water bombing to ensure flames don’t creep closer to the town.
To prepare for the risk of forest fires during the upcoming summer, the Commission is launching today the first fleet of firefighting aircraft under the new rescEU system to tackle natural disasters. So far seven firefighting airplanes and six helicopters will be part of the rescEU fleet during an initial transition period, and the Commission is (more…)
ACADEMICS PUT down the authorities’ failure to control this year’s smog crisis in the North to an inappropriate “command-and-control approach”, adding that this problem will persist if the strategy is not revised.
The recent years have seen an alarming increase in forest fires across India. According to the Real Time Forest Alert System of the Forest Survey of India (FSI), the number of forest fires shot up to 14,107 from 4,225 between November 2018 and February 2019.
The fires that devastated Indonesia in 2015 were chiefly linked to drought, topography and population, researchers have learned. Fires were most likely in flat, sparsely populated areas where there had been little rainfall. Although the connection to rainfall was no surprise, the other influences were unexpected.
The Forest Survey of India’s large forest fires monitoring programme data shows that there are 192 large, active fires in the country today
As many states face higher than normal maximum temperature, instances of large fires have increased more than six times across the country within this week.
The forestry department has signed a contract with a private company for the lease of two helicopters to fight fires during the summer, the department announced on Friday.